A Friend in Need

Ileena, a young but self conscious friend of Teela's who despairs at her lack of strength, falls prey to the evil wizard Jarvan, who uses an addictive potion to make her part of an attempt to get his hands on Eternia's Transmutator. He-Man tells viewers drugs can not make their problems go away, and will often cause more.

He-Man: "In today's story, Ileena tried taking a magic potion which she thought would help her. Well, she found out there aren't any magic potions. And you know what? There aren't any magic drugs either. Any time you take one from anybody but your parents or your doctor, you're taking a very big chance. You're gambling with your health, maybe even your life. Drugs don't make your problems go away, they just create more".

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Zikran

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms and Jarvan

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn, Ileena, and Old woman

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and Door security

"If only I were more like Teela, this wouldn't have happened."

- Ileena

"He made you dependent on some kind of drug. You're lucky you didn't continue."

- He-Man

"I wanted to be like you, Teela."

- Ileena

"A Friend in Need" opens with a delivery, not a battle. Ileena arrives at Eternos with her father, who has brought along his own invention, the Transmutator, and within the first five minutes the show has quietly set its real stakes: not the device itself, but the girl who stands next to it feeling like the least impressive person in the room. Teela rides out with her into the hills, and when the geyser field nearly overcomes them both, it's Teela who keeps her head while Ileena panics. "If only I were more like Teela," she says, moments after He-Man hauls them both clear of the gas, "this wouldn't have happened." That line is the episode, and everything after it is Filmation working out the consequences of a kid believing it.

Jarvan, the sorcerer who escaped the Prison Mine in the cold open, almost never factors into the plot as a villain in his own right. He factors in as a dealer. His old-woman disguise doesn't fool anyone watching, but it isn't built to: Linda Gary's voice makes it a comfort act, all soft reassurance and no threat. A bad bargain is supposed to sound exactly like that. "It will make you feel anything you want to feel," the potion's seller promises, and the writing is careful never to oversell the high. One dose makes Ileena brave enough to climb down from a tower without fear. It wears off by the time she tries to fly her father's air car and nearly kills Prince Adam doing it. The episode doesn't dramatize a villain's scheme so much as a withdrawal, and that's a harder thing for a Saturday morning cartoon to attempt than another Skeletor raid.

The back half cashes the metaphor in literally. Jarvan doesn't ask Ileena to fight for him; he asks her to steal, because her voice print opens the one door he can't. She does it with Orko helping to wheel the Transmutator out to the terrace, never once suspecting what he's carrying. By the time she confesses to her father, the show has let her make the worse choice twice, once for the feeling and once to keep from losing it, and it never lets her off easy for either. "I wanted to be like you, Teela," she admits at the end, and it lands harder than the moral tacked on afterward, because the episode already showed the mechanism: not low self-esteem in the abstract, but one specific girl standing next to one specific friend and deciding she came up short.

He-Man's fight with Jarvan is the episode's best set piece and its most ordinary one. Cornered with a Transmutator at full power, Jarvan shrinks the entire palace down toward nothing, and the animation sells the panic of a building folding in on itself better than it sells the sorcerer wielding it. He-Man plants himself at the center and holds the shrinking against his own body until the machine burns itself out. The problem can't be punched, so he becomes the thing that won't move instead. It's a strong sequence wasted a little by Jarvan himself, who never develops past "escaped prisoner with a grudge," and whose whole scheme runs on Ileena's addiction doing the work he can't do himself.

We've seen plenty of after-school lectures in a loincloth on this show, and "A Friend in Need" keeps clear of the worst of them because it never pretends the fix is simple. Teela and Adam don't lecture Ileena into feeling better. She gets there, if she gets there at all, by catching Jarvan herself with the ring he gave her, doing one brave thing on her own terms instead of borrowed ones. That's a more honest ending than the closing narration gives it credit for. The drug-message framing feels like the price of admission for airing it, but the episode underneath is really about comparison, and it earns that subject more than it earns the moral stapled to the end of it.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved March 9, 1983 and final script revision took place August 11, 1983. The character model sheet for Ileena indicated that her midriff was covered by armor. But the colorists decided to make this section flesh-colored, giving her a much more revealing outfit than originally meant. When summoning Jarvan with the ring he gave her Ileena says "Em ot emoc" which is "Come to me" said backwards.
2. After He-Man saves himself from falling by grabbing onto a tower, his lips are moving but no words are heard. In the original script, the line was "Thank goodness!". After Ileena confesses she gave the Transmutator to Jarvan, the script originally indicated that there was supposed to be the sound of an explosion. This is why Man-At-Arms looks so startled and Prince Adam immediately runs off. This is one of the very few episodes to not feature any of the main villains.
3. Continuity: When Orko informs Adam that Teela and Ileena aren't back yet, Adam and Cringer are sitting at Man-At-Arm's Memory Projector from Teela's Quest. Jarvan assumes the same old woman disguise previously used by Evil-Lyn in The Curse of the Spellstone and again in The Royal Cousin. A slightly altered version appears as the good witch in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Brigis and then as a disguise used by Catra in Portrait of Doom. The animation of Orko wiggling his fingers when he recounts Jarvan's history is a sequence previously seen in Diamond Ray of Disappearance. Jarvan's character model was reused as Zem in The Return of Granamyr and partially as Spyster in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode The Inspector.
4. More continuity: Zicran's character model was recolored and used as Brindle in The Return of Granamyr. The android horse is seen again in The Royal Cousin & Pawns of the Game Master, where it is called 'Strider' by Adam, though it is not the same character as the toy based Stridor that would be seen in Origin of the Sorceress. The Royal Palace courtyard where Jarvan re-materializes is seen again in Eternal Darkness when He-Man and Teela jump onto their Sky-Sleds to go to the Crimson Valley. The background used for the geyser field will again be seen as the landscape of Spikeheart in She-Ra: Princess of Power episode The Crystal Castle. Ileena was supposed to make an appearance in the Masters of the Universe: Revelation episode Poisoned Chalice, voiced by Kevin Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith. Although her lines were recorded, the scene was cut. It would have been revealed that Ileena had become the new Captain of the Eternian Guard, taking Teela's place. Together with a battalion of Royal Guards, Ileena was posted outside Castle Grayskull/The Hall of Wisdom to make sure nobody would enter it. Teela and Andra would end up fighting Ileena and the guards while Evil-Lyn snuck into the Castle during the battle.
5. Animation errors and goofs: Ileena's character model is too large in proportion to the table and chairs she is standing behind when she summons Jarvan. Later, she collapses in front of the table and now she is the right size. When Ileena is about to summon the old woman for a third helping of the potion, the part of her forehead that is visible between her hair above her tiara is colored yellow like her hair by mistake. After He-Man jumps over the fire created by Jarvan, it cuts to a close-up of Jarvan, but the background plate remains the same. During the Palace shrinking scene, Man-at-Arms' hand is flesh-colored instead of green.
6. Orko's young friend Kor experiments with a forbidden potion and falls into a coma. The episode is famous for being one of the earliest cartoon stories to address drug abuse directly.